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St Peter,
Ringland

I
stood outside the graveyard gate, looking up at
the tower and the length of the clerestory. At
first, it was unfamiliar. Turning away, I walked
a little way back along the lane to Weston, and
looked around again at the church. Autumn was
rapidly taking a grip on central Norfolk, and so
I did not see the trees in full leaf as they had
been sixty years before, but I imagined the young
lady talking to the old man, and the mother and
child walking towards the churchyard gate, and it
all fell suddenly into place. I was looking at
the cover of Munro Cautley's magnificent Norfolk
Churches and their Treasures, the 1949
follow-up to his similar 1937 volume on Suffolk,
the dust jacket a beautiful water colour of
Ringland church by Albert Ribbans.

Cautley's
work on East Anglian churches was so influential
that, at this distance, it is difficult to see
how innovative it was at the time. Like Augustus
Welby Pugin in architecture, or The Smiths in
popular music, so many people were inspired to do
similar work that he has become indistinguishable
from the great wave of his admirers. But up until
Cautley, ecclesiological writing had been a
somewhat dry and dusty affair, and topographical
essays were a gushing and sentimental form of
journalism, with all its implied inaccuracies.
Cautley's writing about the churches of Norfolk
and Suffolk exhibits at once a great enthusiasm
and an academic precision, albeit one prone to
error. It is the writing of a man who knows his
subject in reasonable depth, and is eager to
share it. Betjeman was a great admirer, and there
are echoes of Cautley in Betjeman's own writing
about churches.

It is
writing of its time. The 1930s and 1940s were the great
age of the walking and cycling enthusiast. The road
network which emerged during the 1920s and 1930s opened
up the countryside for exploration, but the land was
still secretive and little-known enough to make that
exploration exciting. Britains steam railways had worked
their fingers into the remotest of places, places which
would be lost to the rail network within a few short
decades, and it was perfectly possible to leave Liverpool
Street station in London at the crack of dawn, spend the
day cycling around remote Norfolk lanes visiting
churches, and be back home in time for a late supper. For
the more ambitious, the network of Youth Hostels and the
proliferation of country inns meant that a walker could
easily spend a week wandering around the East Anglian
countryside without ever needing to enter a town.
Exploring churches was a cheap enthusiasm in the days of
a depressed economy, and the restrictions and privations
which wartime brought only made the prospect seem more
attractive. It could be said that, by the time Cautley
published his Norfolk volume, there was already a
bittersweet nostalgia for the pre-war era.

He had
written his Suffolk volume in his official capacity as
Diocesan architect for St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, but it
was the journeys which he had made in his younger days
which informed the bulk of the follow-up work on Norfolk.
As he says in his introduction, For forty years I
have been visiting churches in Norfolk and compiling
notes and taking photographs... and so many people have
urged me to publish them that rather unwillingly I have
consented. My reluctance arose because my notes have to
be so condensed to bring them within the compass of a
book owing to the current restriction on paper... it must
be understood that I am in my 74th year and that owing to
petrol restriction it is impossible to go round and take
the photographs again.

Cautley
was not a Norfolk man. He was born at Bridge in Kent,
where his father was Rector, and when he was a small
child the family moved to Ipswich. He lived in the
Suffolk town for the rest of his life, although his
parents would later move to Belton in what is, since
1974, Norfolk, and be buried there. Cautley himself is
buried in a corner of the graveyard at Westerfield in the
suburbs of Ipswich. Being native to the southern county,
and having explored it first, his writing about Norfolk
is tinged with a hint of the exotic, as if he was
exploring a foreign country with which he was quite
familiar, but where his status as an outsider might
occasionally be betrayed by his accent and manners. He
has that fascination with remoteness, in both time and
place, which was typical of the early 20th Century
urbanite. He was more at home in his beloved Ipswich, in
his little office above the shops on the edge of the
Cornhill. This was where he designed three churches and a
chapel for Ipswich, as well as banks, a library and a
mock-Tudor shopping centre, and wrote these books.

The
occasion on which I first saw Ringland church through the
eyes of Cautley and Ribbans was not the occasion on which
I took the photographs for this page. After years of
being kept locked, St Peter is in a benefice of open
churches these days, but Ringland continues to keep
somewhat eccentric hours. I'd first come here in the
autumn, and then again on a day of windswept, icy showers
in raw March. Both times the church was locked, and there
is no keyholder notice. We considered ringing the Rector,
who I know is extremely friendly and welcoming to church
explorers, but his rectory is miles off, and we couldn't
spare the time getting a key would demand. But in October
2008, more in hope than anticipation, we turned up at
Ringland far too early for the church to be open, but it
was. Indeed, the friendly Rector was inside. He explained
that he was just sorting some things out, but he offered
to leave the church open for us, and he would let the
lady-who-unlocks know that we were already in there.
Since this would obviate the need for her to think that
we had broken in, and call the police to arrest us, we
accepted with pleasure.

It must be
said that I already knew that Ringland church was the
most important church in Norfolk which still had to make
its way onto the pages of this website. There may be
bigger churches, there may be more famous ones, but none
so artistically and historically significant as St Peter.
For this alone, I was excited. We had already stepped
through the fine 15th Century porch with its flanking
angels and flushwork base course. This leads into an
overwhelmingly 15th Century nave and aisles, with a
large, elegant clerestory above. If the tower had ever
been rebuilt, it would have been one of the most
magnificent exteriors in central Norfolk. And yet, this
is not a huge church - Peter, Tom and I had some
disagreement as to whether it should be in our 'Top 50
larger Norfolk churches' or 'Top 50 smaller Norfolk
churches' lists. Perhaps it is best described as a
medium-sized church, but that it is to make it seem
mundane - Ringland church exhibits the finest qualities
of late-medieval grandeur on an intimate scale. The first
indication of this is the wonderful nave roof. There are
similar roofs at St Peter Mancroft in Norwich and
Framlingham in Suffolk, both much bigger churches, but
neither of them has anything like the impact of the roof
here. The hammerbeams are disguised by coving, as if it
was a vast rood loft, with flights of angels punctuating
the coving, and more learned angels supporting the
wallposts. It is breathtaking. The coving lifts the roof
as if it were floating in space, and beneath the coving
is Ringland's famous clerestory - as Pevsner observed, it
is exactly how a Perp clerestory should be.

As if all
this were not enough, set into the clerestory is one of
central Norfolk's best collections of late Medieval
stained glass. Pevsner points out enthusiastically that
it dates from the same time as the window tracery, but as
we shall see we will need to be wary about its
provenance. For a start, why is it in the clerestory at
all? It was set here in 1857 by the King Workshop of
Norwich, and while it may well have come from Ringland
church originally, it certainly did not come from this
clerestory. There are five main figures. Two of them, the
Blessed Virgin and St Gabriel, form an Annunciation
scene. Another Blessed Virgin holds the Christchild. The
last two figures are St John the Baptist, and what must
have been a magnificent Holy Trinity scene, with God the
Father seated, the crucified Christ on his lap and the
dove of the Holy Spirit descending. Beneath them are the
figures of donors at prayer. These must originally have
been at the bottom of the windows which contained the
larger figures, possibly the east window, perhaps the
aisle windows.

The
clerestory glass was annoyingly difficult to photograph.
Not only is it high up, the brightness of the low morning
sun on this day in October flooded into the church from
the south side, making the north side of the clerestory
as bright inside as it was outside.

I
suggested before that we must be open to the possibility
that this glass did not originally come from Ringland
church. This is because the rood screen dado with its
painted Saints clearly didn't. It simply doesn't fit the
chancel arch. The panels are eight figures from what is
known as a Creed sequence - that is to say, twelve
Apostles holding scrolls with clauses from the Apostles
Creed. Not only are there not enough of them, but the
ones that do survive are out of order. Obviously, at some
time, the panels have been removed from the dado and
replaced. A 9th panel hangs in the north aisle, depicting
St Philip. It is not impossible that St Philip and the
three other missing Saints formed the gates of the
screen, but more likely that the screen was once longer,
and came from elsewhere, possibly even Weston over the
hills. The survivals here are St Jude, St John, St Andrew
and St Peter on the north side, and St Matthew, St James,
St Thomas and St James the Less on the south side. All of
them have been heavily attacked by iconoclasts, with
virtually no trace of face and hands surviving on any of
them.

We had
just about finished squeezing what Graham Greene called
the last ounce of pleasure out of St Peter when the
lady-who-unlocks came in. She pottered about, as such
people do, and we had a chat about Ringland church and
its survivals. Indicating the roodscreen panels, she told
us that they used to be very dirty, and you could hardly
make anything out. "What happened?", I
wondered. "Did the Courtauld Institute restore
it?" She shook her head and smiled grimly. "No,
I had a go at it with some hot soapy water", she
told us. Which may, I suppose, explain why the faces and
hands were scoured quite so clean.

The roof,
glass and screen are magnificent, but Ringland has
quieter treasures, including a 14th Century font, and a
contemporary roundel in the south aisle depicting a
centaur playing a viol, his tail sprouting a vine and a
little dog running beneath him. As Sam Mortlock says, he
might have sprung out of the pages of a 14th Century
manuscript. There's also a roundel for St Mark.

And
what did Henry Munro Cautley have to say about
Ringland church? For the Norfolk volume, he
adopted a curious star system, offering favoured
churches up to three stars. Most Norfolk churches
received none at all. Ringland gets two. He tells
us that it is beautifully situated... with
the lovely road approaching it from Taverham.
This is where Albert Ribbans stood to do his
watercolour on a fine day in late spring shortly
after the War. Cautley also observed, years
before Doctor Pevsner, Sam Mortlock or me, that the
church has one of the finest roofs in Norfolk. He
spends most of a lengthy paragraph on the roof,
but takes time to tell us about the glass in the
clerestory, albeit mistaking the Holy Trinity for
the Crucifixion (easily done) and St John the
Baptist for St John (a misreading of his notes?).
Such mistakes are part of the charm of Cautley,
and occur more frequently in Norfolk than in
Suffolk. In the southern county he could demand,
in his official capacity, that scaffolding be put
up for him to examine features and take
photographs (as he did for the Stanningfield
Doom). In Norfolk, he was one of us, doing his
best under difficult circumstances.

When
Cautley was at Ringland the rood screen was still
at the back of the church, where it had been put
by the Victorians. Apart from that, the church is
as he saw it in the first decades of the 20th
Century, as are almost all Norfolk churches. We
follow in the footsteps of Cautley all across
Norfolk and Suffolk, and those of his wife Mabel,
who receives the charming dedication of the
Norfolk volume: To my dear wife, who in a
long and happy married life, has, for forty-five
years, unselfishly accompanied me all over
England and Wales inspecting churches, and must,
in the number of churches she has seen, hold a
record for her sex.